Brian Rudman: Goring goes on until mayor understands role

Reading yesterday's headlines about a rampant stag goring two rivals to death, I had to wonder whether the triumphant one was called Hubbard or Hucker.

A rather surprised deer expert, Peter Aitken, explained that "adult stags can be a bit stroppy in the roar, but most would have finished by mid-May".

Well that might be so in South Canterbury where this goring took place. But up here in the winterless north, Top Stag Hubbard and Deputy-Stag Hucker have been locking antlers since Auckland City Council ballot boxes closed last October. And chances are, unless one or other of their hips give out, or someone slips some bromide into their bedtime cocoa, they'll still be pawing the ground and jabbing away come election day, 2007.

And by then we'll be so sick of the scrapping that those nice conservative Citizens and Ratepayers Now who customarily rule the city will sweep back into office.

The root of the problem is that Auckland Mayor Dick Hubbard, a political tenderfoot, refuses to accept his place in, if I can switch the farmyard metaphor, the political pecking order. On Monday he was again at it with councillor Neil Abel, a Green member of Dr Hucker's majority City Vision team, discussing ways of replacing Dr Hucker with fellow team members, Vern Walsh or Richard Northey.

This is just six months after Mr Hubbard first tried to engineer a coup to depose his deputy and cobble together some sort of mayor's majority from across the spectrum of the 19-strong council. He failed then, and there's little evidence he'll do any better now.

For a moment last week it seemed as though the mayor had finally cottoned on to his titular role in life. That's when he went all Tim Shadbolt on us and promised to fling himself from the Sky Tower if the Auckland rugby team lost to the visiting Lions. It's the cheerleading role former mayor John Banks used to talk about.

After the Lions' victory, Mr Hubbard went through with his promise - though from the look on his face as he leapt, he could well have been thinking that even another round of goring from Hucker was better than this.

The mayor's refusal to accept his limited role highlights the basic flaw in an electoral process that selects the mayor on a citywide basis but gives him or her no more voting power than an individual councillor.

The result is a mayoral chair who has to control a council which soon divides into majority and minority factions. The reality is the majority faction - in the present Auckland City example, Dr Hucker's City Vision-Labour-Action Hobson team - has the power to push through their policies whatever the mayor wants. A smart mayor - John Banks and Cath Tizard spring to mind - learn to go with the flow and tinker where they can.

Canny mayors realise that despite their high and mighty title and ermine-trimmed robes, the system allots them little more power than that enjoyed by the Queen or a Governor-General. Mr Hubbard, who one suspects is accustomed, as the founder and chief executive of a successful private company, to getting his own way, is finding having just one vote out of 20, a difficult adjustment to make. But unless he wants to be slowly gored into oblivion, he has no option.

This is hardly a unique tussle. Four years ago, Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey spat the dummy after three years trying to rein in council foes, and demanded the right to sack the deputy mayor and to personally select the chairs of council committees, positions traditionally decided by majority vote.

This attempt "to herd cats", as another mayor once described the process of trying to control his councillors, failed. And rightly so. In a democracy you can't go giving monarchical powers to one person - even on a temporary basis.

The tidiest solution is to do away with the directly elected mayor, and adopt the parliamentary system of councillors selecting a city leader from among themselves.

This does away with the maverick mayor, often out of kilter with the majority view on council. It would certainly do away with the dispiriting warfare currently raging at Auckland City, which is not only slowing progress, but can only be further alienating citizens from the democratic process.